body wood and s-500 mfd pickups

[Salmon]

craig confirmed that there are three body woods available to custom order in the s-500 deluxe.

it's swamp ash, mahogany or alder.

what do you all think of the different woods in combination with s-500 mfd pickups?

[supereiv]

In my opinion, it depends on what you're looking for :
MFDs go well with swamp ash, if you want snap and pop
they go well with mahogany too, but the sound feels more compressed, goes better with higher gain IMO.

for what it worth.

[Lazer]

The difference in tone will be very minor. If the finnish is transparent I would go for the
best looking wood, mahogany i.m.o, otherwise the lightest, which is not so easy to
determine when You order, You get what You get, but on an average an Alder body
would be lighter then Swamp ash.

Cheers
L-zr

[supereiv]

I disagree, the attack and frequency response is very different between mahogany, swamp ash and alder...

[Lazer]

Sorry, but I beleive that is a myth, there is a difference but other components makes a lot more
difference.

Cheers
L-zr

[supereiv]

You can believe what you want and I respect this.
he was talking about same pickups, same guitar, different wood not other components.

[Craig]

You can believe what you want and I respect this.
he was talking about same pickups, same guitar, different wood not other components.

Also, the S-500 Deluxe has a Maple top on the body, as well.

[supereiv]

To spice it up a tiny bit, you can, at least you could, order the S-500 deluxe without a top !

Yes, even though I didn't compare side by side two S-500 deluxe, one with and one without the top, usually, I can hear the difference between a maple top vs a no-top guitar (did this before).

[louis cyfer]

The difference in tone will be very minor. If the finnish is transparent I would go for the
best looking wood, mahogany i.m.o, otherwise the lightest, which is not so easy to
determine when You order, You get what You get, but on an average an Alder body
would be lighter then Swamp ash.

Cheers
L-zr

in my experience alder is heavier than swamp ash, but lighter than northern ash. mahogany is kind of blend looking with a transparent finish, swamp ash has much nicer figuring.

[Lazer]

The difference in tone will be very minor. If the finnish is transparent I would go for the
best looking wood, mahogany i.m.o, otherwise the lightest, which is not so easy to
determine when You order, You get what You get, but on an average an Alder body
would be lighter then Swamp ash.

Cheers
L-zr

in my experience alder is heavier than swamp ash, but lighter than northern ash. mahogany is kind of blend looking with a transparent finish, swamp ash has much nicer figuring.

My experience is different, could depend on that swamp ash varies more then alder. My experince also tells
me that the individual piece is more important than the speices.

Cheers
L-zr

[jediguitarist]

Sorry, but I beleive that is a myth, there is a difference but other components makes a lot more
difference.

Cheers
L-zr

I also think body wood is negligible in electrified tone of an instrument. Get the one that looks best to you and makes you want to play. Combinations of bridge, nut, strings, pots and pickup height make more of a difference to me.

[Salmon]

i'll probably choose swamp ash.

each of the three woods can have a boring wood grain pattern mahogany is probably always boring, alder sometimes but swamp ash can be spectacular and it will be on the back anyway.

if we could choose the piece of wood i might want one without a flamed top if topless is an option but choosing the wood is not.

[Miles Smiles]

Yep, the best is to choose for optical reasons, as everything else might work, but there seem to be no 100% rules for the sound of different wood types. This is what I heard from different guitar builders, following video hints in that same direction:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRT7HnQJ6qU[/video]

[supereiv]

Now, someone tells me there's no difference in sound !

[Miles Smiles]

Now, someone tells me there's no difference in sound !

There's a difference, from body to body, but there's no guarantee that a particular body sounds how it does, just from the type of it's wood. Or in other words one Alder body might sound different from the other, even if they are from the same tree. Or the difference between an Ash and and Alder body might be less than the difference of two pieces of the same tree.

A guitar builder might choose from piles of bodies and necks, to create a guitar with the sound a customer likes to have. If you may just order Alder, Ash or Mahogany it's depends on coincidence how it will sound.

And as they guy said in that video, there is no "better" just "other".

[Salmon]

you would think (i would generally speaking) this would have something to do with grain and density and be less unpredictable if comparing species of tree woods. you could walk up to something and knock on it and hear some sign of its mass and gather some consistent data. maybe not that simply.

oh well, being an unpredictable factor is the best conclusion of any because we are free to choose based on the look of the wood.

you just have to be willing to take another risk along with receiving a nice looking piece you hope for a resonant piece.

[louis cyfer]

Yep, the best is to choose for optical reasons, as everything else might work, but there seem to be no 100% rules for the sound of different wood types. This is what I heard from different guitar builders, following video hints in that same direction:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRT7HnQJ6qU[/video]

i doubt the guy in this video is even clear about this stuff. he seems to confuse himself, and say contradicting things, so i am not sure it carries much weight.

[Salmon]

i didn't watch the video until after your post louis. the problem as I see it is that the guy doesn't seem to be clear on what his objective for making the video is. he is just randomly making points comparing apples to oranges without a singular goal almost as if presenting contradiction in an effort to confuse so he can conclude it all is irrelevant. like using confusion for sake of debunking. maybe that is giving too much credit to him and he simply is unclear of his knowledge as you say.

but it is relevant when it is organized. you don't necessarily match a quarter-sawn neck with a straight-sawn to balance out a particular body wood. as a buyer we don't usually have that luxury. the factory just plunks down one piece of wood next to another. need a neck for a body, boom boom. everything makes some difference. you have to be much more organized and scientific about it and you can grab a bunch of things that are not intrinsically equal and use their differences to make a point about how those differences can be used to end up with something calculated but he is sloppily mixing everything up.

at least when ordering a custom guitar from g&l customization cannot be controlled as much as desired from the buyer's standpoint so you are still left considering beauty rather than tone when making choices.

[louis cyfer]

In my opinion, it depends on what you're looking for :
MFDs go well with swamp ash, if you want snap and pop
they go well with mahogany too, but the sound feels more compressed, goes better with higher gain IMO.

for what it worth.

more compressed would mean less dynamic range, why is that a good thing?

[blargfromouterspace]

i doubt the guy in this video is even clear about this stuff. he seems to confuse himself, and say contradicting things, so i am not sure it carries much weight.

I wonder how much of the price of a Custom Shop instrument 20 seconds of knocking on two bits of wood makes up - $1000?

[supereiv]

more compressed would mean less dynamic range, why is that a good thing?

I said it feels more compressed, not better

Is it a good thing ? Is a compressor a good thing ? Sometimes it is, sometimes not.

I'm convinced that wood does make a difference, I think some species share similar ( not identical) characteristics, and that is a guide when shopping for a new guitar. I didn't mean ONLY the wood makes a difference, nor if that wood is better than the other. But I do think that choosing a guitar based on beauty ONLY could be really wrong. And I do think everyone can do what they want.
And last but not least, I spoke about my opinion, I try to respect others opinion, which is apparently something really hard to do for some persons in here

[Salmon]

supereiv,

i think louis may have mistaken the part about the compressed feeling going better with high gain as that you were saying it is better in a broader sense.

[suave eddie]

In my opinion, it depends on what you're looking for :
MFDs go well with swamp ash, if you want snap and pop
they go well with mahogany too, but the sound feels more compressed, goes better with higher gain IMO.

for what it worth.

I wish someone could provide a sound bite describing "snap" and "pop". I think I know what "crackle" sounds like already.

I have MFDs on my swamp ash ASAT Classic. I don't know if it snaps or pops.

[Salmon]

i think by snap and pop he means crisp and clear tonal range not muddled or compressed.

but this might help

snap starts at :06, crackle :17, and pop :31

[youtube]q6TIsxTdrCU[/youtube]

[supereiv]

In my opinion, it depends on what you're looking for :
MFDs go well with swamp ash, if you want snap and pop
they go well with mahogany too, but the sound feels more compressed, goes better with higher gain IMO.

for what it worth.

I wish someone could provide a sound bite describing "snap" and "pop". I think I know what "crackle" sounds like already.

I have MFDs on my swamp ash ASAT Classic. I don't know if it snaps or pops.

Really funny !
I wish you could describe me how mahogany compares to swamp ash in french.

[Salmon]

supereiv,

i appreciate what you have shared here regarding tone, mfd's and wood. i have an asat classic swamp ash with mfd's and i would say it has snap and pop. i just posted that rice crispies commercial because suave eddie used the three words snap, crackle and pop. i thought it was funny.

thanks again

[louis cyfer]

supereiv,

i think louis may have mistaken the part about the compressed feeling going better with high gain as that you were saying it is better in a broader sense.

i know he said with high gain, but i still don't understand how it helps to start out with a more compressed signal, when the gain is gonna compress it plenty already. i know what compressed sounds like, i have no idea what compressed feels like. i do agree that going on looks alone is not a good thing though. the sound is complicated though, and while everything effects the sound, it is hard to know how much and which way.

[Salmon]

in the initial comment supereiv said the mahogany feels more compressed. (sound ties in with feeling to me but this is also semantics) with that, it would go better with high gain. that doesn't look like he is saying compressed is better. it looks like he meant because it is compressed it would work better in a high gain set up than something else.

he didn't say it helped having a compressed sound.

so as far as wood selection goes, with the limited ability we have to choose which pieces we get the biggest impact available to us is visual. I can always make adjustments somewhere in the gear and parts but you get what you are given once you choose the type of wood. as long as none of the three are dramatically different picking the one that will add the most beauty makes sense to me.

what do you think?

[supereiv]

No problem salmon, that wasn't for you . I was just pointing the fact that bashing, even with humor, somebody for not being accurate on describing sounds in a foreign language sounds a little easy for me.

That said, I will try to clarify myself, the mahogany S500 I have, feels like it don't react as easier, or as fast as a swamp ash Legacy I have, or a swamp ash ASAT classic I have, just like if I had a compressor in the chain, does that make sense ? Because of that specificity, it makes higher gain sounds much more manageable, just like a compressor would. It doesn't mean I only play high gain with it, in fact, that feeling makes it relaxing in funk rythm too. But when playing country/blues hybrid picking stuff, it makes it less appealing, to me, IMO as usual.

I found that exact feeling in some PRS and some Gibson which were made of mahogany w/maple top. But I may be wrong, maybe was it coincidence.

That said, a lot of well known strat players play alder body strat, why alder and not swamp ash ?

[NickHorne]

Not that many ash strats around, surely simple as that? The alder is the generic strat sound in most players' perception, professionally accepted unless going custom for some other idea.

Defining wood / tone in FRENCH??! Yeah!! Fun! We can't ever get close in English without all kinds of odd facets of human nature popping up all over.....

[supereiv]

What ? Are you implying that alder sounds different than swamp ash !!

By the way I agree with you about alder strat being the generic strat sound in most players' (and listeners') perception. There are lots of cultural behavior in those perceptions.

[Lazer]

No problem salmon, that wasn't for you . I was just pointing the fact that bashing, even with humor, somebody for not being accurate on describing sounds in a foreign language sounds a little easy for me.

That said, I will try to clarify myself, the mahogany S500 I have, feels like it don't react as easier, or as fast as a swamp ash Legacy I have, or a swamp ash ASAT classic I have, just like if I had a compressor in the chain, does that make sense ? Because of that specificity, it makes higher gain sounds much more manageable, just like a compressor would. It doesn't mean I only play high gain with it, in fact, that feeling makes it relaxing in funk rythm too. But when playing country/blues hybrid picking stuff, it makes it less appealing, to me, IMO as usual.

I found that exact feeling in some PRS and some Gibson which were made of mahogany w/maple top. But I may be wrong, maybe was it coincidence.

That said, a lot of well known strat players play alder body strat, why alder and not swamp ash ?

The perceived characteristics has more to do with the construction and the neck. The neck wood is more important
then the body wood. For the PRS and the Gibson they mostly have a shorter scale and set necks versus G&L,
mostly bolt on necks with longer scale.

Cheers
L-zr

[suave eddie]

In my opinion, it depends on what you're looking for :
MFDs go well with swamp ash, if you want snap and pop
they go well with mahogany too, but the sound feels more compressed, goes better with higher gain IMO.

for what it worth.

I wish someone could provide a sound bite describing "snap" and "pop". I think I know what "crackle" sounds like already.

I have MFDs on my swamp ash ASAT Classic. I don't know if it snaps or pops.

Really funny !
I wish you could describe me how mahogany compares to swamp ash in french.

My comments were not meant to bash you personally.
I read several other guitar forums and these same terms get thrown around all the time as if they had some universal accepted meaning. Snap and Pop to me personally have no meaning whatsoever and I was serious about sound bites to demonstrate these tonal qualities. I read your description of a "compressed" sound--did you mean to imply that there is actually a delay after picking a note before it is translated to sound?

The issue of "tone woods" gets pretty heated on other forums and I don't want open up that can of worms here--it seems most people have their minds made up and sometimes have a lot emotion tied up in their belief systems. My personal belief is that the body and neck woods on a solid body guitar do not contribute significantly to the tonal characteristics but I would not try to argue with you as you obviously have your own thoughts and as I said this subject sometimes can get out of hand.

If you can actually provide sound clips of identical guitars with different body woods so I can understand what you are describing that would be great. I don't intend to beat this dead horse any more.

Salmon understood my joke about Snap. Crackle, and Pop--you may have to be from America and a certain age to appreciate it.

Peace

[supereiv]

It's ok and I agree with you about that specific issue of tonewood, it seems to be a matter of beliefs, and there's no point to try to convince each other when there's "faith" thrown in the mix.
It seems that I took something wrong with your joke, sorry for that, it's more a matter of writing than anything else in my opinion, and, guess what, in France snap crackle and pop was on rice krispies box too !

As for the compressed feeling, it's more related to the attack and decay of the notes, that's why I wrote more about a feeling than an objective reality.

I'm afraid I have no record to provide, but I would be glad to explain that (with a beer or two) if you or anyone of the GbL forum comes near Paris one of these days.

Cheers

[Xochitl]

In my opinion, it depends on what you're looking for :
MFDs go well with swamp ash, if you want snap and pop
they go well with mahogany too, but the sound feels more compressed, goes better with higher gain IMO.

for what it worth.

I wish someone could provide a sound bite describing "snap" and "pop". I think I know what "crackle" sounds like already.

I have MFDs on my swamp ash ASAT Classic. I don't know if it snaps or pops.

Really funny !
I wish you could describe me how mahogany compares to swamp ash in french.

Edit: answered but then realized you weren't the OP.